Once upon a time I bought a camera and started taking pictures. And I compounded it by making up meanings for the objects on the other side of the lense.
I kinda played at science.
People see… some sciencey thing, like a bacterial culture or an ionogram, and they make up meanings for it. It’s so much easier to do for an ionogram! You understand at once that it’s an abstraction (a number), and so has to be deciphered in a specific way. You may play around with different sets of them, with different software settings, but in the end, the knowledge you derive from it all has to obey a convention of understanding.
A bacterial culture is not an abstraction. It is a physical object, free from conventions. There are many ways to take abstractions out of it, and every one of them requires that a story be invented first (a causal structure). There are also many ways to make it a different physical object; for example, it can be overgrown by a fungus. Dr. Fleming saw it happen. He refused to invent that it had been spoiled (although he could not very well deny it), and that’s how we got antibiotics. After Dr. Fleming went with his outrageous new story instead, and got some abstractions out of it, and fitted to them some specific analytical tools.
I mostly can’t invent new stories. I like to do… what I like to do, a subset of that which I already know. And those new things aren’t here yet, to know them.
But my preferences are. I like to laugh. To not have to defend myself. To get awed. To be proved right. To meet friends as friends.
...Which was how I ended up taking pictures of our geese. But it started with a name.
Or rather, with two. Two very special characters, who had been “them big white birds” a day before. But now, they became photographable, and then, suddenly, visible.
I saw their shapes and colors. Ways they move. Things they do. Foods they love. I heard the sounds they make. All of it had been there before, we had “seen” it, we had to have observed it on some level to even come up with the names… but it had been big white birds’.
Not theirs. Not mine.
And now it was. After I had aimed my camera at them, and my husband aimed his.
Of course, we immediately antropomorphized them to hell and back. They had Views, like Granny Weatherwax. Fears. Mannerisms. Tropes. They started grumbling. Writing songs. Wishing people happy birthdays. Going through their old photo albums!
Other geese wanted in on the fun, which is how they behave anyway. They told stories about the cat, the ducks (including the Lady Duck, a wild bird who brought her babies to swim in our pond), the chickens, the dog, and the goats. We had a young rooster who used to fly over to the neighbors; it did not bode well for his life expectancy, at the hands of my father-in-law. But we named him Columbus, and suddenly, he was opening the New World. Twice a day. (He is now in his prime and a very fine chicken man).
...All of this would not let me discover antibiotics.
But I learned something from it.
To tell a story, you can start with taking a picture
...of something you might have named but not yet seen.
Joke, take photos, and invent stories.
Once upon a time I bought a camera and started taking pictures. And I compounded it by making up meanings for the objects on the other side of the lense.
I kinda played at science.
People see… some sciencey thing, like a bacterial culture or an ionogram, and they make up meanings for it. It’s so much easier to do for an ionogram! You understand at once that it’s an abstraction (a number), and so has to be deciphered in a specific way. You may play around with different sets of them, with different software settings, but in the end, the knowledge you derive from it all has to obey a convention of understanding.
A bacterial culture is not an abstraction. It is a physical object, free from conventions. There are many ways to take abstractions out of it, and every one of them requires that a story be invented first (a causal structure). There are also many ways to make it a different physical object; for example, it can be overgrown by a fungus. Dr. Fleming saw it happen. He refused to invent that it had been spoiled (although he could not very well deny it), and that’s how we got antibiotics. After Dr. Fleming went with his outrageous new story instead, and got some abstractions out of it, and fitted to them some specific analytical tools.
I mostly can’t invent new stories. I like to do… what I like to do, a subset of that which I already know. And those new things aren’t here yet, to know them.
But my preferences are. I like to laugh. To not have to defend myself. To get awed. To be proved right. To meet friends as friends.
...Which was how I ended up taking pictures of our geese. But it started with a name.
Or rather, with two. Two very special characters, who had been “them big white birds” a day before. But now, they became photographable, and then, suddenly, visible.
I saw their shapes and colors. Ways they move. Things they do. Foods they love. I heard the sounds they make. All of it had been there before, we had “seen” it, we had to have observed it on some level to even come up with the names… but it had been big white birds’.
Not theirs. Not mine.
And now it was. After I had aimed my camera at them, and my husband aimed his.
Of course, we immediately antropomorphized them to hell and back. They had Views, like Granny Weatherwax. Fears. Mannerisms. Tropes. They started grumbling. Writing songs. Wishing people happy birthdays. Going through their old photo albums!
Other geese wanted in on the fun, which is how they behave anyway. They told stories about the cat, the ducks (including the Lady Duck, a wild bird who brought her babies to swim in our pond), the chickens, the dog, and the goats. We had a young rooster who used to fly over to the neighbors; it did not bode well for his life expectancy, at the hands of my father-in-law. But we named him Columbus, and suddenly, he was opening the New World. Twice a day. (He is now in his prime and a very fine chicken man).
...All of this would not let me discover antibiotics.
But I learned something from it.
To tell a story, you can start with taking a picture
...of something you might have named but not yet seen.